This invention relates generally to railyards, and more particularly to means by which the status of a railyard can be partially or wholly determined using known locations of locomotives within the railyard.
Railyards are the hubs of railroad transportation systems. Therefore, railyards perform many services, for example, freight origination, interchange, and termination, locomotive storage and maintenance, assembly and inspection of new trains, servicing of trains running through the facility, inspection and maintenance of railcars, and railcar storage. The various services in a railyard compete for resources such as personnel, equipment, and space in various facilities so that managing the entire railyard efficiently is a complex operation.
The railroads in general recognize that yard management tasks would benefit from the use of management tools based on optimization principles. Such tools use the current yard status and the list of tasks to be accomplished to determine an optimum order in which to accomplish these tasks.
However, any management system relies on credible and timely data concerning the present state of the system under management. In most railyards, the current data entry technology is a mixture of manual and automated methods. For example, automated equipment identification (AEI) readers and hump computers determine the location of railcars at some points in the sequence of operations, but in general, this limits knowledge of a railcar""s whereabouts to at most the moment at which it arrived, the moment at which it crossed the hump, and the moment at which it departs. There exists a need for a more effective railyard management system to determine the locations of railcars at intermediate steps to have information sufficient to assess railyard status.
In one embodiment, a system for determining the status of a railyard (i.e. location of assets and state of completion of tasks) utilizing the knowledge of locomotive location is provided. The system includes a locomotive itinerary, a comparator algorithm for comparing a locomotive location to the locomotive itinerary, a computer configured with the comparator algorithm, and at least one manager console that communicates with the computer.
To effectively manage a railyard and determine the locations of railcars during many different phases of the railyard management process, the location of locomotives in the railyard is used. Since railcars rarely move without the use of locomotive power, assessment of the location of railcars is determined by continually tracking locomotive motions in the railyard, and comparing those activities with the railcar movement tasks assigned to specific locomotives.
In operation, information relating to scheduled procedures to be performed to a railcar are input to the manager console and communicated to the computer. Procedures such as loading or unloading product to or from a railcar and maintenance to the railcar are input into the manager consoles and the computer compiles information and creates a schedule of the procedures. The computer generates a locomotive itinerary to move the railcar to specified track locations at specified times to perform the designated railcar procedures. Additionally, the computer tracks the location of the locomotive and executes a comparator algorithm to compare the real-time location of the locomotive to the locomotive itinerary. The computer then uses this comparison to determine the schedule status of the railcar.